


Tacita

by Rotpeach



Series: The Great Tumblr Rehoming of 2018 [53]
Category: Till Death Do Us Part (Visual Novel)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Non-Consensual Somnophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-09-16 09:39:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16951608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rotpeach/pseuds/Rotpeach
Summary: The sorts of cracks one expects to see in a marriage are of boredom and mismatched emotion.Not this. Never this.





	Tacita

We are all entitled to our secrets.

Jack comes home late sometimes, later than the last class he teaches and later than the end of his office hours and later than I believed the department could legally keep him on campus, dragging in during that hazy in-between time of late-night-early-morning. I stir at the sound of his keys hitting the formica countertop in the kitchen and hide a smile beneath the blanket at his tired sigh when he pads into the living room.

“You shouldn’t sleep on the couch,” he scolds lightly and with no real bite.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” I say in protest, sitting up and draping the blanket over my shoulders, patting the open cushion beside me. “I was waiting for you to get back.”

And there is some customary back and forth, a tired, “oh, you don’t have to do that,” and a petulant, “I know, but I like to,” comfortable pleasantries and small talk and “how was your day?” Jack undoes the top three buttons of his shirt and I urge him to sit down again, massaging his tense shoulders.

There is more we could say now, but we choose not to; implicit communication is the cornerstone of our marriage, and the knots in his muscles and the lethargy in his movements as he sets his glasses down on the coffee table and massages his temples tells me more than a dozen words could.

(There is a hand-painted calligraphy scroll hanging on the wall behind us, something acquired on a study abroad trip from a lifetime ago.

“Ishin-denshin,” I read aloud when we first moved in together as a married couple and Jack had kept his expression carefully neutral out of uncertainty. “‘What the mind thinks, the heart transmits.’ It’s believed that those with a strong bond can understand each other without saying a single word.” I had been apprehensive to put it anywhere, unwilling to come across as a vapid housewife with a collection of vaguely foreign decorations that lacked any personal sentiment.

“Ah,” he had said, but he had also smiled and wrapped an arm around my waist as he studied the brush strokes. “There’s something to that, I imagine. A particular style of nonverbal communication.”

 _Very thoughtful,_ he did not say aloud though I saw it on his face. We fancied ourselves as being privy to this form of empathetic telepathy. I knew he’d already developed a fondness for the concept but I didn’t know how much until I volunteered to keep the scroll in my office and he counter-offered to keep it in our shared space instead.)

It’s later still when we finally make our way up the stairs and into bed, too late for me to feel it would be appropriate to ask for an intimate touch, and I settle instead with curling up at his side and listening to his breathing and basking in his warmth.

“I hope your schedule lightens up a bit when the semester ends,” I say quietly.

Jack drapes an arm across my body and pulls me into his chest, and his heartbeat is a comforting sound after hours of silence and all I hear is my own fingers on the keyboard, echoing in a house that feels far too large all alone. “It should,” he says, though the kiss pressed to my forehead says, _“I’m sorry.”_

“Maybe we’ll go somewhere,” I offer, burying my face in his chest to say, _“It’s alright, don’t be.”_

“Mm. That might be nice.”

There is more I would like to say. There is more that I keep to myself, that I don’t betray even with my movements or my expression, that never slips through the connection between us because of how tightly I hold onto it. I imagine he has some of these, too, just as many, maybe more.

I wonder if these are things we’re ever meant to speak, or if they’ll keep decaying between us.

*

In my dream, Jack is silent.

(Sometimes the husband conjured by my subconscious is verbose, a splintered memory from the lecture I caught a glimpse of when he called and asked if I could bring a book from home for his office, but this dream is of a different sort.)

We are standing in the kitchen and he is putting on a coat and his shoes, taking his keys from a glass bowl beside the front door. “Where are you going?” I ask, but he doesn’t hear me, never hears me, and maybe he couldn’t answer even if he did. I follow him outside but lose sight of him just as quickly, and the ground swallows me whole before it spits me back up in the woods somewhere.

I wipe worms and sawdust from my eyes, spit out a mouthful of gravedirt. I call Jack’s name but nothing answers, and I worry.

*

 _I have asked once, and I will not ask again,_ I write on college-ruled notebook paper, again and again and again until these words have filled the page. It’s a letter in the loosest sense of the word, a correspondence intended for somebody else though not one I intend to send. I have known people who write these kinds of stillborn letters to burn or to bury, to take the words festering inside of them and cast them out.

But I haven’t decided if I’m ready to let them go just yet. Some evenings when Jack is late, I write the things I would like to say, things that are on my mind, the things that I strangle before they can reach him through the ishin-denshin of our marriage, and then I fold them up and tape them shut and stick them in a shoebox that stays in the bottom drawer of my desk.

It’s a secret, such a small and harmless one, and we are both entitled to those.

(“Are you having an affair?” I asked with neither fanfare nor gentle easing, an urgency I couldn’t explain squeezing my heart tightly. It was an ugly thing to say, tactless and accusatory and so very against my deeply-held fantasies of our implicit style of communication where we did all the talking with our hearts.

Jack had been surprised, and I saw before he ever spoke a careful analysis of his own memories, gaze hardening as he tried to recall what he might have done that would lead me to ask something like this. “No, dearest,” he said with a deliberate, pronounced sincerity he didn’t often feel the need to use, holding my gaze, taking my hand and squeezing gently but firmly.

“I’m sorry,” I’d said, choking on a frightened, embarrassed sob. “God, I’m sorry, that was insensitive. I know, I know you’ve been busy. I never should’ve said that.”

“Come here,” he murmured quietly, opening his arms. “Hush, come here. I’m not upset.”

I felt in his arms a tacit understanding of forgiveness and clung to him, vowing never to ask again.)

I’m startled by my cellphone going off on the table, pen jumping across the page leaving a long streak of black. Jack’s name on the screen makes me answer on the first ring. “Hello?”

“Hey. I’ll probably be home late again tonight.”

 _“Oh,”_ I want to say with a falling, despondent tone, but I fight it back and manage an understanding, “That’s alright.”

“I’m free for the moment,” he says. “If you just want to talk.”

I’ve never claimed to be lonely, but I don’t imagine I hide it all that well, either. It shows in my eyes when he leaves in the morning and my hands when he returns in the evening, a heartfelt embrace, a gentle tug towards the bedroom.

(“Lying is a matter of analyzing risks,” Jack has said at least once before. “You’re just not the type to take risks.”

“Is that an insult?” I asked.

“Not at all. Just an observation.”

I had leaned against him, resting my head on his shoulder, and gave a pleased sigh when he wrapped an arm around me. “Is psychoanalyzing all of my behavior a habit or a hobby for you?”

He chuckled. “Hm. Maybe a bit of both.”)

“What’s that concept you mentioned the other day?” I ask, turning to a fresh page of notebook paper. When I put the call on speaker, the sound of his voice fills the room. If I close my eyes, I can imagine he’s speaking from down the hall, echoing. “You were talking to a student about a thought experiment.”

“Laplace’s demon,” Jack says automatically. “In a strictly philosophical context.”

“Hm,” I say, and that’s all I need to say to imply a lack of understanding and a desire for something simpler–not too simple, but the form in which he would explain it to an undergraduate rather than a research assistant.

Ever the teacher, there is only the briefest pause before my husband thinks of an appropriate simplification. “In short, a single, very clever creature is capable of understanding all there is to know about how the universe works.” I hear a knock on the office door, muffled through the phone. Jack covers the receiver when he says, “Just a moment, please,” but it still crackles through and makes me smile in fondness. “And,” he continues, “because this clever creature knows the precise workings of the universe, it can predict every possible event.”

“Thank you, Jack,” I say softly, gratitude for a great many things in my voice. “I’ll let you go. Try not to work too hard. I love you, dearest.”

“I love you, too.”

The dead air that fills the room when the call disconnects hits me like a punch to the gut. For some reason, I find my eyes filling with tears.

*

In my dream, Jack does not recognize me.

(The husbands who walk across my mindscape are as varied as the shades of sunset, and they grow more numerous by the week. And they are all real, in a sense, they are all things I have seen and things I have heard and things I have pieced together in the absence of the one I see when I open my eyes.)

“I miss my wife,” he is saying, sitting in a folding chair in a little cabin in the woods, arms resting on his knees. “She’s a novelist, you know. I’ve always admired that kind of creativity. Writing a dissertation and writing literature are very different things.”

“Jack, it’s me,” I’m saying, trying to say, speaking through a mouth full of shattered glass and gravel, “it’s me, I’m right here,” but he doesn’t hear. I am broken with my legs bent the wrong way and my neck twisted too far, bones a jumble of pebbles in my whiplashed body. “Jack,” I’m saying as blood coagulates in my throat, pleading with him to see me, to speak to me, _“Jack.”_

“I’ve told her once. I can’t tell her again,” he says. “I’ve whispered it into her ear while she sleeps. The truth is so ugly. I don’t want her to face it awake.”

The characters that spell ishin-denshin hang as disembodied silhouettes in the sky above him, large and ominous, a mockery of what I have always believed we had.

Jack gets out of the chair and kneels beside me-who-he-does-not-think-is-me, touches my hair gently. “We’ll just have to keep this to ourselves, won’t we?” he mutters.

I have never been afraid of my husband before, but there is something about his eyes that makes me wish I could run.

*

Jack is sitting up in bed grading papers and I am standing in the bedroom doorway feeling like an intruder in my own home in a lace-edged chemise falling just above my knees. He looks up and smiles, but his gaze never strays past my face, never trespasses where I would like it go.

“Midterms,” he says with a soft, weary laugh.

(Weariness colors so many of our interactions, I feel, even if we pretend it doesn’t. It’s hiding in the corner of our vision, in the dendrites of our nerves. Jack is weary of my suspicion, and so am I.)

“Can’t it wait?” I ask.

There is a pause, a surprised silence. “Well,” he says, “I suppose it can,” a purely rational tone when no suitable excuse can be found.

“I’ve missed you,” I say as I crawl into bed, gently pushing the papers out of his lap and taking their place there. “God, Jack, I’m sorry. I’ve felt so strange these last few weeks, just off. I can’t shake the feeling that something’s wrong.”

“Dearest,” he begins to say, but I shake my head. I can’t stop now or the words will never come out, they’ll just keep building like a wave and I’ll keep trying to funnel out the worst, the most painful, the most haunted, squeezing them into dead letters crammed into a shoe box casket.

“Something is wrong,” I say. “You won’t tell me what, but something isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.” I take his glasses off and gently set them on the bedside table, and I take his face in my hands, stroke the stubble on his chin. “You’re allowed to have secrets. You’re entitled to them.”

(“Chaos theory exists in opposition to Laplace’s demon,” he has told me in a phone call to soothe my nerves, an evening talk over a dinner we are meant to be sharing where one plate grows cold across from me. “It presupposes that, even if this clever creature knew everything, the universe will still behave in unpredictable ways.”

“Nobody can know everything all the time,” I said in summary, and Jack had hummed in agreement.

All along, this is how we had lived our lives. It was not tacit understand, it was not heart-to-heart communication, it was the expectation that there would come a time that we would be struck by something unexpected and that we would still find our way out. Somewhere deep down, I had known that.

But I believed he was a constant against the backdrop of an otherwise chaotic universe.)

Jack waits, knowing by the way I look down at the sheets separating our bodies with my lip pursed and my brows furrowed that I have more to say, but the words never come. I’m still afraid to let them loose, whether that means to burn or bury or simply speak them aloud, and I keep them inside for another day.

“I love you,” I say instead.

“I love you, too,” he says. He means it, I know he means it, the invisible strings that tie us together, heart to heart, ishin denshin, tug and twist but never tear.

But when I kiss him, it’s a chaste and passionless thing no matter how I run my hands down his arms and over his shoulders, no matter how I press myself against him. Jack opens his eyes when I pull away with a thousand words in his eyes but he doesn’t speak a single one. I wonder if he keeps a shoe box of unsent letters, too.

“Sorry,” I say hoarsely, rolling off of him and settling into bed at his side, “I’ll let you finish work.”

Jack reaches over me but instead of taking the stack of ungraded exams, he turns off the lamp and leaves us both in the dark. “Dearest,” he breathes, folding himself against my back. I gasp at the light brush of his fingertips at my thigh, pulling back the edge of the nightgown and slipping into the waistband of my underwear.

“Jack, you don’t have to,” I try to say, biting my lip when I feel him rub my clit.

He kisses the back of my neck, lips moving against my skin with more fervor than he kissed my mouth, sucking at a sensitive spot beneath my ear. “Darling,” he whispers, “I love you,” two fingers holding me open as he strokes the wet slit of my entrance with another. He pulls me closer by the hips and pumps one finger inside at a leisurely pace, mouthing the lobe of my ear and murmuring a litany of sweet nothings.

(This is a bandaid on a broken arm and scotch tape on a crumbling building, a noble and sincere effort to ease something that has festered for far too long, but for now, just for now, I don’t care.)

“Jack,” I whimper, my hips chasing his hand, thrusting eagerly against his finger and pushing him deeper, “Jack, please,”

(and I notice that he isn’t moving, that his breathing is quiet and even, that he is soft against the back of my thigh and is watching me fall apart from a safe distance with a clear head, but I will forget that for now)

and I cum, alone, shuddering and crying and curling up into a ball, and even with his arms around me, I feel so cold.

*

In my dream, Jack makes love to me.

(But it’s wrong, it’s violent and brutal and animalistic.)

It’s the sort of dream where all of my limbs are full of lead, where I can do nothing but lie motionless as some creature comes out of the dark and stalks towards me, but this creature is my husband and he is ravenous. He pushes me onto my stomach and turns my head to the side, resting on the pillow, and he makes love,

(but it’s wrong, it’s wrong, _it’s wrong_ )

grasps my hips hard enough to bruise, digs his nails in so hard it hurts but the pain is pleasant because he is touching me and that’s all I’ve ever wanted, he presses the head of his manhood to my entrance and he is inside in a single thrust, he is inside and it burns and it aches and it tears me in half.

“Dearest,” he groans, laying over my back and burying his nose in my hair, breathing me, “darling,” hardened member slamming into me, pelvis slapping mine, and he is so warm compared to me, he is so warm and I am so cold, I am shivering and I am trying to arch into his warmth but I can’t move.

I try to say his name but I don’t think he would hear even if I could speak. Maybe I have no voice in my dreams. Maybe there is a shoe box full of letters where all of my words are hiding.

Jack growls in my ear, pulls my hair and rakes his nails over my skin. We are not making love, not really.

(He is fucking a hole, an object that is motionless beneath him, and it would love if it could but it is just as helpless as I am in the waking world, squeezing so tightly that what I want slips right through my fingers.)

*

“Dearest,” Jack says, but different now, softer, the voice I am accustomed to.

I squint into the light of sunrise coming through the curtains. My arm is sore. “Mmn?”

“You were having a nightmare.”

( _“LoveyouIloveyouIloveyou,”_ he’d murmured, biting me so savagely I thought I would bleed)

“Was I really…?”

He presses a hand to my forehead, brows knitted in worry. “You were thrashing around and crying,” he says. “Do you remember it at all?”

( _“SorryI’msorryI’msorry,”_ whispered against the small of my back, kissing and nipping and paying reverence to my body while he tore me apart)

Jack’s face is so close. Through my lashes, through vision blurred with with sleep, I think I catch a glimpse of a face that is his but different

(but wrong).

“I….” I swallow nervously, turn away, bite my lip, “I dunno.”

Jack is disappointed. He doesn’t act like he is, though, pressing a kiss to my forehead and telling me to take it easy as he starts to get ready for the day. He is thinking, _“What now?”_ as he moves around the bedroom, silent and drifting.

When he is gone, slipping out the door for his morning lecture, and I am left alone to gather my thoughts, I am thinking the same thing, wandering from room to room as if everything around me is a place I’ve never been, a cold and unfriendly house that is not really a home.

 _“What now?”_ I think as I take out the trash in the morning when I realize he forgot, stopping when a small, brightly-colored package in vivid orange at the bottom of the bag catches my eye. _“What now?”_ I think in apprehension, a biohazard symbol adorning the plastic.

I tear open the seal and find a used syringe. I roll up the sleeve of my nightgown and find a small pinprick. I think, _“What now?”_

We are all entitled to our secrets.

(But they are only increasing, and we are being crushed beneath their weight.)


End file.
